Our smartphones are a constant companion in our life, but despite providing us with access to a vast range of services, and indeed people, research from Baylor University reminds us that they’re unlikely to give us purpose or meaning. Indeed, it’s quite possible that it will do the opposite.

To understand the link between our devices and our sense of purpose, the researchers utilized data from the Baylor Religion Survey. They believe that their findings suggest that instead of providing us with purpose, our smartphones are more likely to be linked with loneliness, unhappiness, and depression.

“Human beings are seekers—we seek meaning in our relationships, our work, our faith, in all areas of social life,” they explain. “As researchers, we were interested in the role that smartphones—and the media they give us instant access to—might be playing in meaning-seeking.”

Smartphone attachment

Indeed, the researchers suggest that our attachment to our smartphones could be anomigenic, and be contributing to a breakdown in social values.

“This is because of the unstructured and limitless options they provide for seeking meaning and purpose and inadvertently exacerbate feelings of despair while simultaneously promising to resolve them,” they explain. “Seeking itself becomes the only meaningful activity, which is the basis of anomie and addiction.”

Interestingly, they argue that our fundamental search for meaning and purpose may in itself be contributing to the feelings of attachment we have for our phones.

“Our research finds that meaning-seeking is associated with increased smartphone attachment—a feeling that you would panic if your phone stopped working,” the researchers continue. “Social media use is also correlated with increased feelings of attachment.”

This sense of attachment was also found to be highest among those who actually used social media less frequently. They argue that by using our phones in shorter spurts, we may actually be exacerbating the sense of attachment.

“What is interesting is this association decreases for the heaviest of social media users,” the researchers explain. “While we don’t know how this group uses social media, it might be that normalized use at the highest levels erases feelings of attachment for the individual—as we put it, it would be like saying one is attached to their eyes or lungs.”